Renegade Fireman Superhero Kisame
by Tozette
Summary: In which Kisame refuses Obito's recruitment speech and leaves Mist to find his real calling. Crack. No pairings.


Uh, warning for crack, seriously.

* * *

Hoshigaki Kisame was disillusioned. After the mess with Suikazan Fuguki, the web of lies was all laid out in front of him. Something was rotten in the Village Hidden in the Mist, and it seemed like nobody cared but him.

He certainly couldn't believe in the village, or in the Mizukage who had been so easily controlled. Uchiha Madara's proposal had its own merits, but Kisame was beyond idealistic thinking. A 'world of truth' was simply too much to believe in.

But if he looked hard enough, there had to be something out there. Some path. Some purpose that didn't cut deeper with every bitter breath. So determined, Kisame shouldered Samehada and left the Village of the Bloody Mist.

He told the guards that his reason for leaving was classified. They didn't stop him, and in no time at all the mist had swallowed him.

* * *

Finding a purpose in life was actually a bit trickier than Kisame had initially suspected.

He worked odd jobs as a mercenary: steal this jewel, protect this caravan, murder this politician. Really it wasn't so different from being a village ninja, except that he didn't have to worry about reporting or superiors.

Sometimes people thought it would be easy to avoid paying a missing-nin by killing him or turning him in, though.

Those people had to be dissuaded.

That was all right. Violence was kind of the spice of life for a swordsman.

The first couple of months were a little rocky - there was a kind of accepted etiquette to being a missing-nin that Kisame hadn't been taught in Mist. While he quite liked the occasional bloody dustup, he wasn't exactly a stealth fighter.

When he got into an argument with a supplier or another missing-nin, he frequently ended up hurrying away from the scene with a series of increasingly annoying hunter-nin on his tail because it turned out that flooding an entire valley with water, letting out enough chakra to power a thunderstorm and leaving a bloody carcass shaved into bits and drained of all residual chakra was kind of the tracking equivalent of standing on top of a flagpole screaming 'HOSHIGAKI WAS HERE PLEASE COME AND KILL ME.'

Yeah.

Anyway.

After a couple of months, however, Kisame found that he could actually get along just fine only killing people he was paid to kill, for the most part. That was... you know, boring, but it paid the bills.

Not that he really had bills.

Or a home to which one might send bills, as it happened.

* * *

Being huge and inhuman and intimidating was good for a ninja, but it was somewhat less useful when you had to negotiate your own contracts.

"I understand," he said politely to his latest employer. This one wasn't the insufferably arrogant type, thankfully; instead he shook and sweated like an idiot and struggled to complete full sentences.

His name was Matsumoto and he seemed quite fixated on the sharpness of Kisame's smile.

"Um," said the man, who was a great deal smaller than Kisame.

"I will protect your gem for the price we agreed upon, Matsumoto-san," he said, inclining his head.

The little man nodded, apparently thankful that he didn't actually have to use his words to get to the conclusion of their discussion. "Ah... thank you," he said, offering Kisame a trembling hand.

It was a show of good faith among civilians that was largely meaningless between shinobi, but Kisame was raised to believe that good manners were welcome everywhere. He reached out and shook Matsumoto-san's hand.

The man's skin went white, drained of all colour, and for a second Kisame thought he was going to faint again.

* * *

The caravan ride was boring, but at least all Kisame had been required to do was to sit in the warm dark of the cargo section and doze while his traps and chakra remained undisturbed around the gem.

When they reached their destination, which was the sprawling trade city of Souin, it became more interesting. The city's expansion was largely due to it being one of the more accessible ports, and it was extremely lively: pick-pockets, porters, foreigners in wigs. It was dry and hot, and the civilian pedestrians cowered under an array of parasols and hats. From the caravan, he saw one lady knocked by foot traffic into the runoff from a drain. She emerged muddy, soaked and angry as a wet cat. Kisame smiled.

They stopped at the docks, where Matsumoto had arranged for one of the pricier teahouses to serve as a viewing place for his gem.

Kisame supervised its unloading, trying his best not to give into an unprofessional yawn. He couldn't feel or see a ninja anywhere, and increasingly he suspected that the only threats he'd be dealing with were civilians.

It had been a long time since he'd taken a C-rank mission.

Maybe he should have brought headphones.

* * *

Kisame should _definitely_ have brought headphones.

He stood leaning on Samehada, looking effortlessly intimidating, while Matsumoto had tea with six different businessmen in a row. They each brought an independent valuer or jeweller to examine the gem, all of whom hemmed and hawed and declared it eventually authentic.

One or two of them gave him very uncertain glances.

He made sure to smile at them.

Nobody fainted, but one of them whimpered, so he considered it a job well done and resumed trying not to yawn.

* * *

As it turned out, nobody at all came for the gem. Matsumoto sold it for a small fortune, gave Kisame his pay and waved him on his way.

For what was basically a glorified D-rank mission, the pay was extremely good. And while Kisame had contemplated stealing the gem and flogging it to the highest bidder, he much preferred jobs when he got paid properly and everybody kept his word.

He pocketed his money, waved vaguely to Matsumoto, and disappeared into the crowd. Souin had the benefit of being interesting, at least. It was full of foods from different places across the continent, and every corner had a new shop of exotic wonders - most of which Kisame decided were useless junk, but pretty to look at.

(Civilian cities, thought Kisame, were strange. There was much more emphasis on the free market, and much less regulation of trade, information and media. There were no stores of weapons or armour in sight, and no sign of anybody leaping effortlessly from roof to roof. Unsettling, but not unwelcome.)

In the poorer areas of town, the houses were built close together, sealed with peeling paint and in various states of disrepair. Barefoot children scrambled through the streets, getting their inevitably sticky fingers into everything. One of them had such an underdeveloped sense of self preservation that he actually barrelled into Kisame's knee, much to the big man's amusement.

Then he looked up at him and burst into screaming tears.

Well, you win some, you lose some.

Kisame blinked at him once, gingerly patted his fluffy head, then ignored his bawling and kept walking.

He smelled the smoke before he saw the fire, but the ruckus the lady of the house was putting up made it hard to ignore. Sooty smoke spilled into the air, billowing out in an unhappy cloud.

"Fire!" screamed the woman's voice, high and shaking with grief and terror. She had a shawl wrapped around her and a babe in one arm, but she was gazing upon the building like there was something a lot more precious than furniture and a few heirlooms in there. "_Fire_!"

For the most part people ignored her. One of her neighbours heeded her in as much as he began to draw bucketfuls of water to dampen his own wooden home, which was nearby.

"Help me!" she yelled at a man in a soldier's uniform. "My father's inside!"

Curious and unashamed, Kisame inched closer to hear what was being said. "That's a great pity, ma'am, but your best decision would be to evacuate. I'm sure the proper authorities will be along soon."

"He's eighty!" she yelled, grabbing him by the collar one-handed. Her baby began to wail at the tightness of her grip."He can't get out!"

Kisame eyed her.

"I shall take no offense because you're plainly hysterical, ma'am, but -"

"HELP ME," she screamed in his face. She had a strong set of lungs.

What did it matter, anyway? Kisame had chakra to burn, and it certainly wasn't a difficult target to hit. He had finished his job in this town - and it wasn't even a very draining justu. It wasn't worth much to him.

He flicked through a couple of seals and summoned a wall of water.

It did put out the fire.

It also drenched everything in the vicinity.

Steam hissed and boiled around them, and then quickly cleared as the excess water ran off.

There was a cacophony of noise: panic and yelling and civilians crying about ruined produce and baking and things, none of which he cared about overmuch. The lady with the baby was soaked to the bone.

She and the soldier stared at her house.

It was blackened around the edges, but it wasn't on fire.

"Well," said the soldier, disentangling his sopping uniform from her lax fingers. "Well." He didn't seem to have anything else to say.

After a second's stunned silence, the baby began to scream again.

The woman shushed it and dashed inside, yelling for her father.

Kisame shrugged and moved on.

But he didn't forget.

* * *

Fire was something Kisame had rarely seen as a threat when he'd been based in Mist, both because of the constant presence of ninja with water jutsu on hand and the endless shroud of damp mist.

In Mist, rust was kind of more of a problem than fire.

It became kind of a game to him. In every town and city with wooden buildings - which was a lot of them, wood being a lot easier to build with than stone - fire was a constant looming threat. Civilians did their best, but in general their towns experienced a great deal of fire damage over the years.

Kisame enjoyed keeping his eye out, looking for smoke on the horizon, breathing deeply to find the next disaster.

(Hey, everybody needed a hobby, and you could only kill so many assholes before the hunter-nin started to take notice. Again.)

* * *

Kisame had, in his life as a missing-nin, heard people talking about him occasionally. Others like him, or unwary ninja, occasionally even civilian bounty hunters or samurai. If they were smart, they were usually trading whispered stories of the latest reports and trying to _avoid_ him.

Others were less smart, though, so he considered it a matter of priority to keep a wary ear out for that kind of chatter.

It still took him completely by surprise the first time he heard a middle-aged civilian woman spreading his description to a baker's apprentice, beaming like she was spreading titillating gossip, not news of the latest wanted notices.

Civilians weren't the most astute observers of their environments. A tiny genjutsu - and he wasn't even good at genjutsu, really - and nobody noticed he was even there, listening over her shoulder.

"They say nobody's actually _seen_ him put out a fire," she said, pinching a free sample of some raisin bread. "But it's hard not to notice a six and a half foot blue man with pointed teeth, you know? Everybody says it's him."

The irony of her comment was not lost on Kisame, hidden as he was from their senses. He grinned.

"Who's 'everyone'?" asked the baker's apprentice, looking a little dubious. "Some kind of magical monster dude running around putting out fires across the countryside? Seriously?"

The woman produced a magazine triumphantly.

The page she'd folded it to contained a very, very loose representation of what Kisame might have looked like, had he been an abstract amalgamation of all the sharklike ideas haunting the human subconscious.

(Also they apparently hadn't noticed Samehada. How did you fail to notice Samehada? Civilians, seriously.)

"This sounds like something out of a comic book," muttered the baker's apprentice, peering at the page.

"_Doesn't it_?" asked the woman gleefully, with emphasis.

"KASAKO, GET BACK TO WORK!" Bellowed a voice from behind the racks of cooling loaves.

Kisame crept out.

His feelings on the topic were strangely mixed. But he smiled anyway.

Magical monster dude. _Heh_.

* * *

Kisame's increasing popularity as an urban firefighting legend didn't really change his other problems. His name and face were both in the Bingo Book, and most of the higher level ninja who caught a glance at him seemed to want to take a shot.

Hunter-nin from mist weren't that much of an issue. He was a high enough ranking shinobi that he knew most of their tricks, and as long as he didn't prance around like a giant idiot leaving a trail of dead bodies and obvious landmarks that screamed 'I'M HERE, COME KILL ME PLEASE', he wasn't that easily tracked by other Mist-nin.

But the Kazekage had apparently taken an interest in the unrest in Mist, and there were a couple of Sand-nin who had the - unfortunately very effective - ability to listen for him on the wind, and they had to be dealt with. There was just no way around that.

So obviously he had to wait for them to be sent out on missions and murder them.

It wasn't really personal. It was just bad business to leave live enemies hanging around, giving constant updates of your whereabouts. Inconvenient, that.

And then, well, Sand was allied with Leaf.

Leaf had a lot of very determined trackers. Dogs. Bugs. Those weirdos with the milky eyes. It was _endless_.

(It must have been an absolute circus inside that village, and he made that comment from the unique vantage of being a giant shark-man.)

* * *

Kisame was probably unduly pleased with himself. There was no _challenge_ in putting out fires. It shouldn't have been something that gave him a sense of achievement.

But civilians were terrible at hiding their emotions, and they always looked so relieved and pleased, even when they got completely soaked in the process.

He didn't get it, but it was kind of... good?

This wasn't the sort of thing that his superiors in Mist would have approved of. That thought actually cheered him a little bit because anything of which his superiors in Mist would not have approved was probably a step in the right direction, from Kisame's point of view.

He left the singed, damp little village as quietly as he'd arrived.

"Maa," said a voice high in a tree somewhere, one red pinwheel eye whirling, several minutes after Kisame had passed. "That was interesting."

* * *

The Sandaime puffed on his pipe, thoughts churning slowly in his head.

"The Monster of the Hidden Mist has turned renegade to become a firefighter," he repeated, eyeing Kakashi.

"I don't know that he left to _become_ a firefighter," Kakashi drawled. "But that's certainly what he was doing when I saw him."

"And the organisation Jiraiya's mentioned? Akatsuki?"

Kakashi shook his head. "Doesn't look like it. He wasn't wearing their uniform, and he was travelling alone."

"And he just... travels around. Putting out fires?" Sarutobi repeated.

"Yep," said Kakashi.

He trusted Kakashi, trusted his dogs, trusted his eyes, but... "Are you sure it was Hoshigaki?"

"If it wasn't, the guy looked an awful lot like a shark, and had an awful lot of chakra to burn," said Kakashi a little drily.

And obviously it wasn't an illusion because, well, Sharingan.

Kakashi waited with his visible eye curled into a lazy smile.

"Tell ANBU to mark him low-priority," said the Hokage finally.

Kakashi bowed and puffed away, leaving the Hokage scratching his head with a bemused expression.

* * *

**Author's Note**: This story is pretty much entirely the fault of **Angry Paradox**, who reviewed my fic _The Natural Habitat of Haruno Sakura_ and told me that Fireman Kisame would be cool. Look at what you did, seriously.


End file.
